Eva Rose at the Taj Mahal

My daughter Eva Rose, who went to India with Mica, her boyfriend from Palo Alto, sent this photo with commentary—JDL

Here is our picture perfect India snapshot. Couldn't have staged it any better. The photographer was some french teenage girl wearing a tank top. (Not cool, women's shoulders should not be bare in India.) Aside from her cultural insensitivity, she's quite the Ansel Adams.

The day at the Taj began as one of our most stressful. It was the absolute last chance for us to see it and we had a lot of mileage to cover in order to get to Agra (Plains) from Dharamsala (Himalayan Foothills). The morning after the bus ride to Delhi was filled with overcharges and miscommunications. Then a 3 hour drive while Mica had to constantly re-negotiate with the share jeep driver in his broken Hindi. At long last, we made it to the grassy area around the Taj that is closed off to motor traffic and payed not too much more then we had originally agreed upon. Hotel Host was an oasis, not by Conde Nast standards but it was a sanctuary from the day's rushed travel which was riddled with rip-offs.

Our room was fine (by backpackers' standards, this room would not be acceptable even as a Motel 6). We showered, ate an overdue lunch and hightailed it over to the gates. We removed our shoes (common practice when entering Asian landmarks) and felt the cool smoothness of the marble on our tired bare feet. We hustled along with hundreds of other tourists, Indian and foreign, to catch a glimpse of Mumtaz Mahal's tomb, which is covered in inlays of stones like lapis lazuli. We lay down and watched the clouds pass by the minarets for a good while. I had to be careful that my knees weren't poking out from under my skirt (again, not cool). More magic awaited us at the hotel. There was a roof deck that featured uninterrupted eyelines of the Taj, balmy breezes, and bird's eye views of all the surrounding businesses/homes. We saw pet goats being fed dinner on back terraces, heard the radio blare of muslim prayers at sundown and watched the silhouettes of a flock of bats flutter past us. We each got dinner thali platters and I had a banana lassi. Beer would have been better but alcohol isn't available in every state.